Kemi Badenoch: ‘I cannot tell you how much abuse and vilification has been put my way'

Kemi Badenoch - (CAMERA PRESS/Chris Floyd)

“I don’t scare easy,” 45-year-old, Wimbledon-born Kemi Badenoch (full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch) said to me in the back of her car on her way to Kent on Tuesday, to lend support to all the Conservative candidates fighting for survival in the local elections on May 1. “I’m tough. I have to be.”

Well, she needs to be, because Badenoch has not been having such a great time recently. She is struggling to attract donors (apparently, although she quickly says this is not the case — “Completely untrue!”), struggling in the polls, and seems rather unloved by media and public alike. Keir Starmer’s party might be increasingly unpopular — Labour’s honeymoon period was over before they got themselves elected, and every time Rachel Reeves opens her mouth, her divorce from her job looks a little more likely — but the Tories are doing even worse. Labour currently has a 23 per cent rating, Reform are on 25 per cent, while Badenoch’s Tories are on 20 per cent.

The forthcoming local elections might seem like a referendum on Starmer, but if the predictions are correct, the Tories could lose hundreds of seats. Not only this, but a new poll also suggests that if a general election were held today, Nigel Farage’s party would win 180 seats, with the Tories and Labour on 165 each. So she is obviously hugely concerned about the outcome of the local elections.

When you saw a man wearing a blue rosette you knew what they were selling, but now you’re not quite sure. I’ve got to fix that

Kemi Badenoch

“Campaigning for the local elections is going well in the sense that I’m enjoying it,” she says, “but I know it’s going to be difficult. I’m knocking on lots of doors and people are telling me what they are thinking about everything, and there’s just a general disillusionment and a ‘fedupiness’ about politics, that it doesn’t work. And I want to inspire people that it does work. But my party needs to rebuild trust with the public. Because we’ve just been kicked out.”

And the tactical campaigning with Reform, how is that going?

“Look, Reform mostly see themselves more as anti-Conservative rather than anti-Labour, and being the leader of the opposition I’m very much focused on holding the Government to account, and I keep reading about Reform attacking us rather than saying what they would do better. My offer for the public is very simple. This election is not an opinion poll, it’s about who is going to pick up your rubbish, which is what’s happening in Birmingham, rats running around and rubbish piling up in the streets.

“The Labour politicians don’t seem to know how to fix that. Who’s going to sort out adult social care? Special education needs is something I really care about. Who’s going to fix the potholes that are everywhere? I’m not saying we don’t have potholes in Conservative councils, because we do, but compared to other local authorities, we fix them faster.”

So Farage is still obviously a threat. A deeply divisive politician he may be, but if there is someone making a noise in the political sphere at the moment, particularly in Kent, it is him. Can she compete with his personality?

I’m not talking about coalitions, especially not with Reform. A coalition might serve the party by winning an election, but it wouldn’t serve the public

Kemi Badenoch

“Look, every party is a threat, so we cannot be complacent and assume that people will simply go back to the two main parties,” she says in response, probably for the 10th time today (and it was only nine in the morning). “We need to make a compelling offer. There’s no point complaining about what our competitors are doing. We have to focus on the product we’re offering. Last year, a man told me that when you saw a man approaching your door wearing a blue rosette you knew what they were selling, but now you’re not quite sure. I’ve got to fix that. People need to know what authentic Conservatism looks like in 2025, and it can’t be just reheating what we had in the 1980s and 1990s or even in 2010 — it’s got to be new for the next decade.”

Is she open to a coalition with Reform?

“I’m not talking about coalitions, especially not with Reform. They say they want to destroy the Conservative Party, so how can I? Even Labour don’t want to destroy us. A coalition might serve the party by winning an election, but it wouldn’t serve the public. Look at Labour. They won the election, but they have no plan. Reeves is a terrible chancellor, and the National Insurance hike is a disaster, but he’ll never get rid of her because the rest of the front bench is so bad. None of them have ever worked in the private sector, including Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary.”

Kemi Badenoch visiting a farm in Kent while on the local election campaign trail (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire)

Badenoch has quite a roster of former jobs: she is the former parliamentary under secretary for children and families; exchequer secretary to The Treasury; minister of state for equalities; minister of state for local government, faith and communities; secretary of state for international trade; president of the Board of Trade; minister for women and equalities; and shadow secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities.

I’d met her once before, at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last autumn. She was good company, and giddy with excitement about the possibility of becoming leader. She looked like she was fizzing, sending out verbal missives to her assistant as though she were planning a global marketing campaign. Which rather contradicted the gossip from the conference, which was that apparently, she’s actually a bit lazy.

I cannot tell you how much abuse and vilification has been put my way

Kemi Badenoch

I couldn’t recall anything she said, but she was entertaining. She had great energy, which is what you need if you’re going to be leading a political party, obviously, but her goals seemed a little woolly, if I’m honest. On brand, but not particularly visionary, which is a complaint I hear a lot.

The big domestic news of last week was the Supreme Court’s ruling on the trans issue. She must have felt some kind of vindication considering the fact she’s been so steadfast in her support of women’s-only spaces.

“It’s a huge vindication. I cannot tell you how much abuse, intimidation and vilification was put in my direction. I can handle it; I was a minister, and I’m not scared. But the everyday women who were hounded out of their jobs, nurses being made to change in front of a male colleague, it’s a degradation of people’s dignity. Everybody has a right to privacy. So, it was a common-sense issue, and I’m really glad the Supreme Court has brought clarity, although it’s a shame that it had to go to the Supreme Court in the first place.

“Labour has been quiet because their record on this subject is quite shameful. They hounded out Rosie Duffield from the party because she said that men don’t have a cervix. She was just making a statement of biological fact, and yet Keir Starmer said she shouldn’t have said it. Many of them still cling on to this extremist ideology. They want to have a divide between trans people and women, but there is a sensible accommodation. If you speak to most trans people, they say they don’t believe they are biological men or women, and they want to live as [trans]. And we’ve tried to make sure we have respect for that. But there do need to be boundaries, and this ruling is a heavily emphasised boundary which I think is the right one.”

Kemi Badenoch (CAMERA PRESS/Chris Floyd)

She was castigated a few weeks ago when she admitted she hadn’t watched the extraordinary TV series Adolescence, but then seemed to redeem herself when she admitted at the weekend that a young cousin of hers had died by suicide after going down an online rabbit-hole.

But why did she suddenly start talking about it? Was it just an expedient response to the criticism?

“It happened two and half years ago, December 2022, and it was quite shocking. I’d actually talked about it before, but no one picked it up, but it’s something that really concerns me. There’s a whole swathe of issues of young people getting radicalised online — some it’s anorexia, very serious body dysmorphia, religious extremism, where you become nihilistic. There’s something about the way the internet and social media works, where before people couldn’t club together, but the internet allows everybody to find like-minded people. He was quite isolated from his family because he was in Canada. We’re all now semi-detached, spending more time on our phones and less time with reality. And that really worries me.”

Reassuringly, she says that Labour’s AI plans would be detrimental to the creative community, allowing the tech companies to skim at random and without prior approval from copyright holders, but what would she do differently? Her thoughts on this have been interpreted in various different ways by the press, but when I ask her she is unequivocal in her support for a cause that has been championed by everyone from Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Kate Bush.

“The Government don’t know what to do and have been very thoughtless about this. I firmly believe in property rights. If you create it and own it then it belongs to you, and I am very much against free riders, people who exploit the work of others to make a profit and impoverish the people who made the original work. We need to have a regulatory system that allows both types of creators and originators to flourish. At the moment over-regulation is crippling industry, but we have to make sure the regulation is fit for purpose and doesn’t destroy the hard work and the legacy of those people who are creative. I really worry about people deciding they’re not going to become an artist or a cartoonist because AI is going to steal their work.”

And the grooming gangs? She’s been criticised for not being tough enough when she had the opportunity to be so, when she was in government, although she refutes this.

“I find that criticism very odd because we had a child sexual abuse inquiry which didn’t do enough, but I didn’t feel the need to talk about it as I wasn’t a Home Office minister, even though I talked about it in private. I actually mentioned it in one of my leadership speeches before it kicked off at the beginning of this year. But now I’m in opposition I’m really pushing hard on it. One of the good things we did just before the election was launch a grooming gang task force and we found about between 450 and 500 new perpetrators, and that’s astonishing. Labour are not taking it seriously and we need a national inquiry.”

Kemi Badenoch speaking during Prime Minister's Questions (UK PARLIAMENT/AFP via Getty Imag)

Last week I spent an evening with a bunch of Conservatives who are aghast at the way in which Reeves appears to be wrecking the economy, but even more concerned about Badenoch’s ability to articulate any kind of viable alternative. The consensus appears to be that she isn’t strong enough to win an election. They don’t say she isn’t smart, but not smart enough to convince others of her strategy. There is no vision, no big idea you can harness her with.

She’s responsive enough, but I can never seem to remember what she says. I’d bet my house on her never being prime minister, as I’m sure she’s not going to be the Conservative leader at the next election. By then, the party may have done a deal with Reform and will almost certainly be being led by someone else.

When I ask her for her elevator pitch, she says, “Look, it’s not that easy to get the cut through in the way that it might have been 15 years ago, where media is so decentralised, and everyone gets their information in an echo chamber that is supplied by algorithms telling you what you should be looking at. So it’s not that easy. But there is a vision, and the vision is, we have got to make sure we leave an inheritance for the next generation. And the hard work of the previous generation. This government is not thinking about the future.

“We are spending more on welfare than we are on education, and spending more on debt, borrowing to spend on welfare, and this is not sustainable. And it’s not just about not leaving anything for our children, we are actually spending their inheritance. We are leaving them with a mortgage to pay. We have to fix that.

“The vision is about how we will do that. Revolutionising the state, rebooting it, reprogramming it. Because it’s still very 20th century, and it’s not fit for the world we live in, which is a lot more competitive and a lot more aggressive. Other countries are competing with us in ways they never used to, and we need to fix that.”

Leaving an inheritance for the next generation? Well, it’s a very laudable ambition, and you probably won’t get many voters who’d actively disagree with you, but is it the kind of thing you can imagine being plastered across the side of a bus when you’re campaigning to be prime minister in 2029? I’m not so sure.

It took rather a long time to organise this interview, and Badenoch’s lack of enthusiasm was rather irritating, to be honest. In fact, I spent more than two weeks trying to make it happen, spending a lot of time on the phone to her chief of comms, texting late into the night. When I eventually speak to Badenoch, she is far more impressive than I expected and appears completely on top of things. But then she is in campaigning mode, and after a while, if you’re interviewed incessantly, your answers start to form some kind of cohesive argument. Tony Blair once told me that when you’re campaigning you not only act on instinct, but the repetition with both the public and the media actually becomes a force. And Badenoch seems to have a bit of that.

Kemi Badenoch by numbers

2017

Elected an MP for the first time

12,418

Vote majority to be elected Tory leader in 2024

97.3

The percentage of seats being contested by the Conservatives this local election

16%

Britons who have a favourable view of her (YouGov)

20%

People who would vote for the Conservative Party if there was a General Election tomorrow

Saliently, how does she think the Prime Minister is dealing with Donald Trump, and how would she deal with him differently? “I think it’s been a struggle for him. The Labour government has been so critical of Trump, never thinking he would win the first time let alone a second time. He’s trying to be pragmatic, but the pragmatism is a forced one. There’s nothing like being in government to have reality forced on you, and you can make all sorts of fanciful statements in opposition, but the reality is, the US is our single biggest trading partner and we need to get on well with them. Thumbing your nose at the President of the United States means the people of this country will feel the impact. Jaguar Land Rover has paused exports to the US. That’s really serious. I worry that Labour always start with concessions and then hope that things will be fine. That’s not how you negotiate.”

Fair enough, but Starmer has actually been applauded for how he has dealt with Trump, and while he might be vilified at home for the way he’s allowed Reeves to wreck the economy, he’s actually won plaudits for the way he’s handled him. How would she negotiate? How would she handle Trump?

“Negotiation and diplomacy are actually two different things, and you mustn’t confuse one with the other. So I’d handle him exactly the same way I do now that I’m in opposition. You don’t criticise the individual, you criticise the policy. Ronald Reagan had time-limited tariffs and that’s what we should be striving for now. Play the ball, not the man.”

Finally, how confident is she that she’ll be prime minister?

We’ve just been kicked out of office, a historic defeat, and we’d never lost so badly. There is a mountain to climb

Kemi Badenoch

“I like to talk about the confidence the public will put in me. We’ve just been kicked out of office, a historic defeat, and we’d never lost so badly. It was worse than 1997. I’m trying to do something that no one has ever done, namely come back in four years. There is a mountain to climb, and I’ve only been doing it for five and half months. Rebuilding the trust of the public is the key thing. And if I do, they will make me prime minister.”

So there we are. I actually like Badenoch, as she’s smart, feisty and says the right things. In fact, there is nothing she says that I necessarily disagree with, it’s just that everything she does is responsive rather than pro-active. And this vision thing, this compelling argument? I’m not sure it’s actually there. I might be wrong, but right now I can’t see it.

Good luck to her, I say, although I think Badenoch’s going to need rather more of it than I can supply. Just as I was explaining to my house guests this weekend why I had been spending so much time on the phone, their extremely savvy, politically astute teenage daughter walked into the room.

“Who does this chief of comms look after?” she said. “Kemi Badenoch,” I replied.

“Who’s that?”